Any chance we can play with more than four leagues in the next FMMobile?

[Arsy]

I have been playing this game since the 2014 edition and the one thing that hasn't changed over these years (and is number one on my wishlist) is the number of playable leagues. Why are we still limited to only four? It cannot be a hardware limitation as phone performance has increased so much over the years. Why can't at least those with a sufficiently powerful phone activate more? And it's not like it even requires such a strong SOC, one of my friends plays it on a 3-year old phone, powered by a lowly Snapdragon 625 with 4GB RAM, and has absolutely no issues running four major leagues (Italy, Germany, Spain and England), including all possible lower leagues, enhanced match engine and a database of almost 25k players. So how come we are still limited to only four? Any chance for an upgrade to at least six and maybe a setting for eight, if your phone's hardware can handle it?

 

Also, as a fan of statistics, any chance we can keep all the data from previous seasons for us to enjoy? Does it take up so much storage that it would be impossible to keep? At least provide an setting that we can activate, to keep the data, with a warning about the increased storage space or something.

 

Thank you!

[Marc Vaughan]

Thanks for the suggestion - the answer is possibly, its something we continually review.

(but do bear in mind that a fair proportion of users are using hardware which is 8 years plus old)

[Arsy]

Are you telling me that some players are using Samsung Galaxy S II and S3s to play the game?! Wow...

 

Anyway, just because some users have ancient hardware doesn't mean those with more recent phones, and I mean like 3-4 years old, so not even the latest generation, should be limited in how they can play. I think that increasing the amount of loaded leagues would add tremendously to the game's appeal. 

 

Thanks for the response!

[Marc Vaughan]

11 hours ago, Arsy said:

Are you telling me that some players are using Samsung Galaxy S II and S3s to play the game?! Wow...

Yes and older devices - we continue to support WVGA (800x480) because about 3% of Android users are on phones with that resolution ... same is true with iOS devices, a lot of people don't upgrade devices until they have to.

[Hummingbird Saltalamacchia]

This bugged me on FM19Mobile and now it’s still bugging me slightly on FM21Mobile. Only four playable leagues still which isn’t that bad but this limits the amount of players you can buy, of course you still can buy players with various different nationalities who have no club and who are available for loan etc, but you are basically restricted to buying players from the four selected leagues that you’ve chosen. You can still find the odd player or two from clubs in different parts of the world but what would be great is being able to buy any player from every league, would that be possible in the mobile version? I don’t know, go to every other league outside of the four you have chosen and all the players are highlighted grey which obviously means you can’t buy that player, it would be great to go and buy a cheap player from San Marino, Faroe Islands or Andorra etc if you are a really small club which I am at the moment. Be a bigger club and go to Brazil or Argentina to sign some players. I’m not sure why lots of other clubs are featured in the game when A you can’t be that club and B you can’t buy players from that nation. When you press on search followed by find a club you basically can search for hundreds of teams from Africa to South America but yet you can’t buy any of the players at these clubs which is odd, so why are they in the game? As I alluded to before it would be amazing to buy any player from any league, this would be a great new feature in itself. 

[Marc Vaughan]

12 minutes ago, Hummingbird Saltalamacchia said:

This bugged me on FM19Mobile and now it’s still bugging me slightly on FM21Mobile. Only four playable leagues still which isn’t that bad but this limits the amount of players you can buy, of course you still can buy players with various different nationalities who have no club and who are available for loan etc, but you are basically restricted to buying players from the four selected leagues that you’ve chosen. You can still find the odd player or two from clubs in different parts of the world but what would be great is being able to buy any player from every league, would that be possible in the mobile version? I don’t know, go to every other league outside of the four you have chosen and all the players are highlighted grey which obviously means you can’t buy that player, it would be great to go and buy a cheap player from San Marino, Faroe Islands or Andorra etc if you are a really small club which I am at the moment. Be a bigger club and go to Brazil or Argentina to sign some players. I’m not sure why lots of other clubs are featured in the game when A you can’t be that club and B you can’t buy players from that nation. When you press on search followed by find a club you basically can search for hundreds of teams from Africa to South America but yet you can’t buy any of the players at these clubs which is odd, so why are they in the game? As I alluded to before it would be amazing to buy any player from any league, this would be a great new feature in itself. 

The players you see at mot of those clubs aren't 'real' they're what we call virtual players and they exist in zero memory space within the game using some crafty geek magic to do with predictable random number generation - this allows us to keep the club sane for game balance if they play in continental cups etc. - but there are some restrictions upon what they can do (ie. they have no player histories and can't be bought etc.).

The number of players 'active' within the game is a non-linear factor in slowing down the day to day processing which is why not all players are loaded actively into a particular game (FM PC does the same thing).

To explain this further the game contains a number of loops like this:

for( all players in the game )
{
    do some stuff

    for( for all players in the game )
        do some stuff
}

Thus for games the amount of processing done by number of players isn't linear to the number of players - in the example given the 'inner most' loop would be called 1 time with 1 player, 4 times with 2 players, 16 times with 4 players, 10,000 times with 100 players, 100 MILLION times with 10,000 players etc.

Disclaimer - This is a ludicrously simplistic explanation of things, within the game its far more complicated, I'm just trying to explain the situation in a manner people can understand.

[Hildor]

My humble opinion is to give us the chance to have more active leagues and then have the recommended for the speficic phone (like on pc). It would be each one choice to play with recommended or add more leagues, if that's even possible to do on mobile that is. 

That way you would make happy those of us who want more active leagues and those who just load one league. 

[Marc Vaughan]

6 hours ago, Hildor said:

My humble opinion is to give us the chance to have more active leagues and then have the recommended for the speficic phone (like on pc). It would be each one choice to play with recommended or add more leagues, if that's even possible to do on mobile that is. 

That way you would make happy those of us who want more active leagues and those who just load one league. 

It is incredibly dangerous on a mobile device to presume that the amount of memory available at any time is the same as another - such devices will frequently have huge amounts of memory in use because people simply don't close applications upon them (when you swipe or whatever to put one in the background it doesn't 'really' close) and this makes the concept of how many leagues should be available volatile.

I doubt many users would understand that today their device can only support 4 leagues because they haven't rebooted their phone in 5 days and have 12 other applications open, but last week after a clean reboot it could run 8 - it is for this reason that I try and keep things consistent and easy for users to understand, this also ensures the game is as stable as possible (as having the game crash and people potentially lose save games isn't acceptable to me).

That being said - as I mentioned earlier we constantly monitor such things and its possible we might be able to up the limit at some stage in the future.

[Wolflikeme]

On 28/01/2021 at 15:48, Arsy said:

I have been playing this game since the 2014 edition and the one thing that hasn't changed over these years (and is number one on my wishlist) is the number of playable leagues. Why are we still limited to only four? It cannot be a hardware limitation as phone performance has increased so much over the years. Why can't at least those with a sufficiently powerful phone activate more? And it's not like it even requires such a strong SOC, one of my friends plays it on a 3-year old phone, powered by a lowly Snapdragon 625 with 4GB RAM, and has absolutely no issues running four major leagues (Italy, Germany, Spain and England), including all possible lower leagues, enhanced match engine and a database of almost 25k players. So how come we are still limited to only four? Any chance for an upgrade to at least six and maybe a setting for eight, if your phone's hardware can handle it?

 

Also, as a fan of statistics, any chance we can keep all the data from previous seasons for us to enjoy? Does it take up so much storage that it would be impossible to keep? At least provide an setting that we can activate, to keep the data, with a warning about the increased storage space or something.

 

Thank you!

 

I feel exactly the same. Even 5/6 leagues to choose from would be a huge boost. If somebody is stupid enough to select the maximum amount of playable leagues on a potato, then that’s their own problem. After 10-15 seasons the game has an extremely limited pool of players (largely restricted to the playable leagues) and subsequently begins to lose it’s appeal. 

 

As for extended stats, I’d love to see club history/achievements/appearances etc for retired players (within the game). It’s nice to look back on club legends.

[Arsy]

16 hours ago, Marc Vaughan said:

It is incredibly dangerous on a mobile device to presume that the amount of memory available at any time is the same as another - such devices will frequently have huge amounts of memory in use because people simply don't close applications upon them (when you swipe or whatever to put one in the background it doesn't 'really' close) and this makes the concept of how many leagues should be available volatile.

I doubt many users would understand that today their device can only support 4 leagues because they haven't rebooted their phone in 5 days and have 12 other applications open, but last week after a clean reboot it could run 8 - it is for this reason that I try and keep things consistent and easy for users to understand, this also ensures the game is as stable as possible (as having the game crash and people potentially lose save games isn't acceptable to me).

That being said - as I mentioned earlier we constantly monitor such things and its possible we might be able to up the limit at some stage in the future.

Can you give us an estimate of how much RAM would be required to be able to safely run 8 leagues? Full leagues, including all lower ones. From your response and my limited knowledge I am assuming that it is indeed a question of RAM and not storage space. That being said, memory management is no longer such an issue these days and the OS simply closes as many background apps as are necessary to run the current app that's in the foreground. That "reboot every five days" thing is a thing of the past...

 

And with no disrespect to those sticking to their Galaxy S3's and such, but we should not have to suffer (not sure if that's the right word) such limitations because of a small percentage of users that are still using antiquated hardware. At least give us the option and maybe limit access to this settings based on how the game assesses your phone's performance.

 

Thank you!

[Marc Vaughan]

5 hours ago, Arsy said:

Can you give us an estimate of how much RAM would be required to be able to safely run 8 leagues? Full leagues, including all lower ones. From your response and my limited knowledge I am assuming that it is indeed a question of RAM and not storage space. That being said, memory management is no longer such an issue these days and the OS simply closes as many background apps as are necessary to run the current app that's in the foreground. That "reboot every five days" thing is a thing of the past...

Off the top of my head no - I'm afraid I can't (I'm actually on holiday at present and while I'm running some support for the game while I wait for my wife to make cocoa I'm not going to do huge calculations).

Sadly memory management is still very  much an issue upon devices - some more so than others, but upon all there are some limitations - if you're interested in this subject then I would recommend you read up upon 'memory fragmentation*' and suchlike. It might also interest you to know that there is a VERY short period within which an application which is being ejected from memory can save itself to disk, if the app doesn't manage to close safely in that time then any data it is using (or attempting to save) is lost.

When Football Manager Mobile is closed due to such issues we have to (1) detect the OS calling for the closure, (2) Save the save game safely. 

The larger the game and the most data which has to be saved the less likely this will be undertaken successfully, especially upon devices which aren't particularly new.

Quote

And with no disrespect to those sticking to their Galaxy S3's and such, but we should not have to suffer (not sure if that's the right word) such limitations because of a small percentage of users that are still using antiquated hardware. At least give us the option and maybe limit access to this settings based on how the game assesses your phone's performance.

I'm afraid I don't take that approach - I value all our customers equally. Not everyone has the opportunity to own the latest hardware and as such I want as many people as possible to be able to play the game.

I also want people to know what they get when they purchase the game as much as possible - hence my preference to allow users a constant number of leagues available rather than have people purchase the game not knowing how it would function on their device.

I appreciate your feedback and suggestions and as mentioned based on the feedback I'm receiving we will definitely look into potentially expanding the number of active leagues in a future product.

All I'm trying to do here is explain some of the complexities in the decision and why the game functions the way it does and a little of the complexities involved in deciding what is safe to run upon a device.

*As a word of warning memory fragmentation can occur both on RAM and also the storage, so your phone might be impressively specced but have fragmented storage which limits its performance and stability. This sort of thing is frequently seen on devices where users have a lot of information stored - this isn't unique to mobile devices, my old MacBook Pro used to suffer horribly from this because it only had a 120Gb disk.

In case anyone is seriously interested in such things here is a link to a paper explaining some of this side of things (It's mainly focussed around the Android OS, but is equally applicable to other OS's) - Controlling Memory Fragmentation in Mobile Systems

[Arsy]

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!

[RickyKosta]

Hi! Why you dont make another APP for recent smartphones? So wend we go to download, the PlayStore choose the best APP for our smartphone. 

I agree with you, all custumers are welcome. So point Taken.. just make more APPs like others developers due also.. cheers! ✌️

[xDARECKIx]

@Marc Vaughan Is it impossible to add option for additional leagues like  PC version? Smartphones and tablets are basically the same hardware as computers, some people use old ones while others have new models. PC players have option to expand database, why you don’t give us, mobile and tablet users, the same. 

[Marc Vaughan]

23 minutes ago, xDARECKIx said:

@Marc Vaughan Is it impossible to add option for additional leagues like  PC version? Smartphones and tablets are basically the same hardware as computers, some people use old ones while others have new models. PC players have option to expand database, why you don’t give us, mobile and tablet users, the same. 

I've already answered this above - it would be confusing to users if they didn't know what the app supported when they purchased it and not everyone has 'uber high spec' devices, as such we will expand the leagues available etc. - but not by restricting who can play the game ... please be patient and bear with us, I'm sure the number of 'active' leagues will grow in the future at some point (but not as an update for this version because it wouldn't be save compatible).

[Havard IRL]

Okay, that would be great on mobile, and on Xbox, isn't it viable? since it is more powerful, it doesn't make sense for 10 countries in the Xbox Series and in the old one only 5, how can you not support it? the old generation is still good, only 5 does not make the game realistic. @Marc Vaughan

Edited March 17, 2021 by Havard IRL